Dragons everywhere! Last week, Square Enix released Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry’s Wonderland 3D, a Nintendo 3DS remake of the very first Dragon Quest Monsters game for Game Boy Color. Unsurprisingly, it slaughtered every other game in the top-20 chart for the week, selling 513,183 copies in its first week alone.

How does that compare to the recent Dragon Quest Monsters games on the Nintendo DS? Here’s a quick look at the first week sales for those:

(2006) Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker – 593,994

(2010) Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 – 623,643

(2011) Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 Professional – 163,008

Not too shabby for Terry’s Wonderland 3D, considering that it was released this early in the Nintendo 3DS’ life. Boosted by the game and a hardware bundle, Nintendo 3DS sales shot up to over 100,000 for the week.

Meanwhile, Level 5’s Guild 01 didn’t fare as well. That game debuted at the #5 spot, and sold 14,790 copies for the week, failing to beat continued sales of Dragon’s Dogma, Mario Tennis Open and Mario Party 9.

Actually MH3G had a slightly better first week, by a couple of thousand copies really. Both sales figures are quite impressive. According to Andriasang, which recently compared both sales figures from DQMTW3D and MH3G, the latter sold 522,000 copies, which leaves Dragon Quest in a very impressive second place, with 513,183 sold copies.

@Suicunesol:[email protected]:disqus Persona 4 should help this month. I think it’ll hit a million by mid-July. Sales will probably start to taper off after that, but then Project Diva f hits in August, so it’ll probably get a little boost from that, too.

Beyond that, though, all bets are off. Once the holiday season kicks off, it’s going to be really hard to compete with the 3DS.

Solomon_Kano

Yea, Sony better have a downright murderous lineup showing at TGS this year.

They literally have NOTHING to drive hardware sales into the holidays. As a Vita owner, I see enough to satisfy my use of it for the rest of the year, but they have nothing to draw in a new user (in Japan, of course). I mean, does Soul Sacrifice even have a tentative release date yet? Would Japan even notice a portable Call of Duty? Is that price one people are willing to pay for a Christmas present? Zone of the Enders HD certainly isn’t going to propel the system.

They’ve really gotta hop to it. Supposedly, we have 60 more games to look forward to this year (that was the number Tretton threw out, I believe). That’s irrelevant if they’re anything like the Vita’s current offerings. Sony needs a hit.

Yeah, this TGS is going to be very interesting to see. It’s going to say a lot about how support for 3DS and Vita will pan out for the foreseeable future.

Ah, I believe Tretton said 25 games? At least, that’s what I seem to recall from the presentation, but I didn’t pay much mind to that remark at all, because I just assumed he was also including download titles like Retro City Rampage etc.

Solomon_Kano

Yea, whatever number he said, I immediately thought of ports and PSN titles. Hopefully they have something big lined up, otherwise they’re really in trouble.

darkfox1

So what do you all think? Interested to hear some opinions and what not.

I really don’t think that 15k is that bad for Guild 01. It’s probably something people will buy once more reviews are out / word of mouth. It’s like a filler game between their bigger releases. The games can’t have taken alot of time and resource to make and I don’t think they had very big expectancies sales-wise.

Göran Isacson

Welp, what can you say- Japan loves them some Dragon Quest. Kid Icarus is still chugging along there on the top list, Dragons Dogma isn’t doing too bad and Guild 01… well. I guess we’ll have to see how much of the shipment actually sold out first.

Solomon_Kano

I’m rather disappointed by Guild01’s sales. With the names attached to it and it being delivered by Level-5, I’d have thought it would do a bit better for itself. Huh.

As for Dragon Quest, I figured it would demolish everything, but it’s nice to see that confirmed. I find it very intriguing that it’s sold near the series numbers on DS with a significantly smaller install base and, while I may be extrapolating these numbers beyond their actual use, it makes me all the more sad about how Kingdom Hearts has performed on 3DS.

While not directly related, and this being a comparison between a mid-range series and a juggernaut, the sales dropoff that series showed just seems all the more appalling when looking at how this practically lost nothing in its transition to 3DS. I suppose that has more to do with SE’s handling of that particular series than anything but… I dunno. For some reason, when I looked at these numbers, I just thought about KH’s poor performance so far. This is obviously a much bigger franchise but, looking at the numbers it’s done historically in relation to the 3DS’ install base and doing the same for KH’s last few outings, I just can’t help but shake my head.

The one thing that I can say about Guild 01 is that it’s a confusing product. It has no one focus, and that terrible box art didn’t help it either. I can’t imagine anyone walking into a store to buy DQ looked at Guild 01’s box and said, “Hey, that looks interesting. I’ll take that, too.”

They probably picked up Monster Hunter or one of the first-party Nintendo games or Harvest Moon instead.

Solomon_Kano

That’s a good point. It was sure to be a tough product to market. It’s not a mini-game collection, yet none of the games included are quite “full”. How do you tell someone the genre? What’s it about? How long is it? It’s a difficult thing to describe, so I can’t imagine that helped in relating it to consumers.

Honestly, if I knew nothing about it, I certainly wouldn’t have walked into a store and picked it up over another game.

I wonder what kind of expectations Level 5 had of it. I mean, they released it as a budget-priced game, so clearly, that confidence wasn’t there. Matsuno’s title looks totally boring, too, and it took the longest time of the four to be revealed, only to end up being the worst looking game on the cart. Sad. :(

I’m willing to bet we’ll see all of these games–and the ones from Guild 02 as well–released as eShop titles eventually. That had to have been the plan all along. Release at 3DS retail first, then eShop, then eventually port them to phones.

Solomon_Kano

Yea, I was actually really disappointed with the reveal of Matsuno’s title. The budget pricing certainly does seem to indicate that they didn’t have high expectations though.

If they release all of the Guild titles on the eShop… that would actually be rather brilliant. I don’t know if I can see Level-5 doing phone ports, but shifting them to eShop is too brilliant to pass. If they don’t plan to do so, that would be even more disappointing.

boundries_san

Ishaan, do u think that GUild 01 had a chance of selling more next week? Considering they are facing a judgernaut title there?

Man, poor Guild 01. Those sales are pretty bad (but maybe L5 had a low shipment?) I’m interested in all the games on the cart, so I hope it gets released in North America (and Europe).

Speaking of Dragon Quest, does anyone know what’s up with Slime Mori Mori 3? I know it didn’t do too hot, but it was released back in launch window in Japan. I really loved the DS game and I’ve been waiting for a localization announcement, but nothing has come up. It would be such a shame if it stayed in Japan again. :(

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